Research source

VI. Other forms of involuntary indications; "involuntary whispering;" the subconscious 334

Date of account: Published 1900
Source: Fact and Fable in Psychology
Reference: Fact and Fable in Psychology · selected passage 155
Rights: public_domain
Language: English
Record updated: 2026-08-24

Record summary

Much attention has recently been paid to automatic writing, or the unconscious indication of the nature, not merely the direction of one's thoughts, while the attention is elsewhere engaged

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

Much attention has recently been paid to automatic writing, or the unconscious indication of the _nature_, not merely the _direction_ of one's thoughts, while the attention is elsewhere engaged. I attempted this upon the automatograph by asking the subject to view or think of some letter or geometric figure, and then searching the record for some trace of the letter or figure; but always with a negative result. While unsuccessful in this sense, the records prove of value in furnishing a salient contrast to the experiments in which the attention was fixed in a definite direction. For example, the subject is thinking of the letter O; he does not think of it as in any special place, and the record (Fig. 26) likewise reveals no movement in any one direction.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This source supplies historical scientific, skeptical or conventional context. Its terminology and conclusions may not reflect current scholarship.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice uses this as an alternative-explanation source, not as an automatic dismissal of testimony. Claims still need to be compared with the actual evidence and current knowledge.

Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.